Gilbert Sorrentino - Aberration of Starlight

But what would he ever have had to say to her? Her sweet face and mouth, her red hair? God, I hate a redheaded woman, Bridget said. And so proved that he had once, in innocence, told her the color of her hair. Everything was a weapon to maim and hurt. When would he learn anything in this terrible life? Could be her father, my God, younger than Marie. Well, Miss Whiting, Jean, I’m so glad that you could have lunch with me — I hope you don’t mind eating at the good old Exchange Buffet, the Eat It and Beat It? Ha ha. Oh, she’d be a good sport. Her bright head across the table and other men looking at him enviously. I’m going to leave my wife because she forced me to insult you in front of a stupid ox of a gawm named Jimmy Kenny, a stupid gawm of a policeman. Then what? Now, Jean, take me somewhere, take me away, show me what to do, show me how to sin, do you want me to “keep” you? I’ve never ever seen a woman naked, do you know that? Oh my God! Not even when I was young, not even my wife, ever ever ever. It’s true! Oh God! Now, my brother Bill, there was a ladies’ man. A little bay rum, kid, a few Sen-Sen, get the old nails buffed and, oho! you win the cigar! The janes fall down and woiship.

And when Marie and the boy came, beaten and broke, she became more of a sloven than ever. Stopped cooking, tied her hair up in old rags, ordered the girl around like she was a servant. Another Katie, another poor Katie in the house. Took it all and worked like a slave and he never once opened his mouth. And where would you be without your mother and father to take you in and put a roof over your head? Stink of garbage from the rattled Mirror. You see how much that dago greaseball of a husband thinks of you, him and his redheaded slut! Bud Halloran was doing it to her, the son of a bitch. He wasn’t much younger than he was! When she’d stoop to open a bottom file drawer he watched how her skirt molded to the shape of her sweet thighs. My sweet Jesus Christ. No, he couldn’t be doing it to her, she was too sweet, too fine, too clean. A virgin for sure. Too fine. Oh Christ, I hope he isn’t doing it to her!

Then started buying two quarts of Wilson’s a week. He’d drink in the closet, the bathroom, guzzle some when she went out of the room. A kind of peace dropped on him into which came her first complaints, then her illness proper. The old slob Drescher with his “anemia.” He drank his Wilson’s and still went out for his pint in the evening, but now he and Marie drank it, while she whined and complained from the bedroom that they were glad to be rid of her now that she was too sick to get out of bed. And he couldn’t look across at his daughter because he knew that they would find in each other’s eyes the truth of her complaint. How quickly she died after being admitted to the hospital. A serious relapse, old Drescher, the horse doctor, said. Right, sure, they call it leukemia. Goddamn horse’s ass! Jean Whiting came to the wake with Bud Halloran and some other people from the office. And she sent a mass card. Back, he was back at work in a week and felt nothing. He looked at Jean’s thighs and bottom and felt ashamed of himself. His lust for her had helped to kill Bridget.

He tried to talk to Marie one night, a couple of weeks after Bridget was in her grave, about how much he had tried, you know, tried, with Bridget, and then he began to cry and as she came over and sat by him while Billy stood unhappily looking on, he murmured, over and over again, oh Bridget, oh Bridget, God forgive me, oh Bridget. As Marie rubbed his back and sniffled and told him that she would take care of him now and that everything would be fine, he knew that he was crying for himself and for that lost alien girl who now, suddenly, appeared in perfect clarity to his memory in a starched white blouse. Her full bosom. Her thick coppery hair. Her slender ankles in taut black silk. We’ll make a family, Poppa, you’ll see, a real family. Oh Skip, Skip. He reached out for Billy and then hugged him tight around the waist, his other arm around Marie’s shoulders. A real family, he said.

The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.

— Brian O’Nolan

1 Stale but mannerly.

2 The voice of the Teuton is heard in the land. Undt zoon ve der peach pie vill steal, ja, Fritz?

3 “La science, la nouvelle noblesse! Le progres.”

4 If a soldier, there was something about her.

5 From fantasy to science-fiction.

6 October banns punished their heir with frosty stinkers.

7 Hark! The crackle of flattery off in the brush.

8 It may be “hard” but nihil sine magno labore, no?

9 Sports et Divertissements? Auf Wiedersehen? Euphonic Sounds? Heliotrope Bouquet?

10 Forget not, O wife, the maddening aroma of same.

11 This may be an Irani name.

12 L. croceo, crocere, fr. Gr. KpoKocre’co, to tear up the purple crocus with wooden mallets.

13 Eros, in his usual slouch, enters.

14 Old saw here used with a want of precision.

15 Herr Noskin: Friend, Sport, and Man!

16 Encumbered with bivalves by the score they were, so to speak, “clammed up.”

17 Dijo una mouthful.

18 In reality, the name of this “spot” was the Hi-Hat.

19 Hangs around in quadriviis et angiportis? In Netcong?

20 Undt den Looie says: “Vhere in tunderation iss der peaches pie?”

21 Nozzing.

22 Maybe this time Sports et Divertissements? Even Avalon?

23 Or liqueurs fortes comme du metal bouillant, if available.

24 These remarks help prove that we cannot live in the country, for the country will bring us no peace.

25 The chalky-white building that “broods” over our story.

26 A las cinco de la tarde with the odor of pot roast and kohlrabi in the air.